Then, during their next caffeine-powered conversation (in which he’d told her about his environmental activism as a student and there had seemed nothing more romantic than standing in front of a bulldozer to protect an ancient forest, and its reserves of genetic information) KC confessed that he felt no other woman ‘got him’ in the way that Eloise did. That no other was such a kindred spirit.
She wasn’t sure whether to be flattered, sympathetic, or suspicious.
Perhaps recognising the hazards ahead and reflexing to defuse them (or worried that this was a move too far, too soon?) KC added with a stutter, ‘I mean, you know, it’s like I’ve found my long-lost British sister, or something.’
She was irritated. Was he playing with her? What had she done to deserve that? Was this part of some manoeuvre, some conjuring trick to make her feel more secure? And what the hell did he talk about in all those private conference calls back to the States? She decided to ask him. Then wished she hadn’t.
‘OK. So, the contamination issues are becoming a serious concern,’ he admitted, ‘and they want to move the whole project back to the US. But they want to invite you over too, and they’re happy to organise a visa. And, hey, I’m sure your secondment deal and per diem would be very generous.’
Eloise had never been in a fist-fight, but she imagined this was how it felt to be sucker-punched. She realised immediately that she could not show it, that she could not overplay her hand. She had to get in to see Eugene first, to email Darius – before letting KC know that this was never going to happen. On US soil they’d be subject to US biotech laws and US patents. The human past that Sarah embodied could be horse-traded like market ‘futures’.
‘Oh, wow, really?’ she said. ‘Wow…’
Then Eloise was tripped up for a second time, as KC declared, ‘Yeah, but I said no. I really think she should stay here. She’s your baby. And we are right on the cusp, it would be crazy to break the momentum. Unless of course you like the idea of a few months stateside?’
‘Well, who knows… I mean, maybe. It’s an idea. Why don’t we think about it? Let me talk to Eugene,’ she replied, preparing to call his bluff. Or at least buy some time.
Eloise forced herself to set aside all the teasing static between them once again. She spent a few fevered days securing assurances from everyone with influence, persuading Eugene to get CCTV fitted both inside and outside the clean room to catch any breaches in security, but she had no idea whether or not she could trust KC. On any level. She kept finding excuses to take more lunch breaks alone and off-site. She tried to concentrate on the work, keen to learn what she could from him but cautious to protect what she should.
*
There is nothing to burn. Not even a dry bush. Stupidly, in her exhaustion she has failed to gather or carry any new wood or kindling. Such a fool! She shouts her fury at herself to the darkening night. The child at her chest wakes and cries, whether from shock or fear or cold she cannot tell, but such suffering is her fault alone and she is unworthy of this living gift, for all its torturous wailing. This unforgiving blessing of motherhood. She does what she can to comfort and quieten her again and the child responds. By some miracle, her milk still comes and she welcomes it, no matter what it may steal from her own body.
The bear skin will offer some warmth, some protection, yes, but even this cannot shield against a rising northerly wind. There is not as much as a tall rock here to break its heartless blowing. She must keep moving to keep them both warm. This in itself is a risk, making them vulnerable to whatever living things here are graced with the secrets of the night. Anything that belongs to a pack, anything big enough, fast enough, sharp enough, quiet enough. Anything with poison in its teeth or in its tail. Any creature guided by the same spirits that are laughing at her now, mocking her pride for imagining that she could kill her totem and not be punished. She is so tired. But if she stops to sleep they will die. She must find the energy to march until dawn.
At least the wind has thinned the dust clouds a little and she can make out a few familiar stars. She must follow them or she will turn herself around and lose the ground that they have gained.
Fool. Fool!
8
‘Eloise, you got a minute?’
‘Yes, sure.’ She smiled brightly at KC, not sure at all what to expect.
‘In private?’
‘Oh, OK. Where?’
‘Sun’s out… How about a bench in the courtyard? I’ll meet you there with a couple of lattes?’
Eloise loved the cloistered courtyard, its time-textured stone, its mottled sunlight and criss-cross of shrubbery, its ‘in memoriam’ benches to academics gone before, but until KC turned up bearing caffeine it had taken on the oppressive aura of a dentist’s waiting room. What the hell is this all about?
He sat next to her. Close, but not uncomfortably so.
‘Hey, so I know you’ve been worried about it but I wanted you to know that I’ve persuaded my guys to drop the move stateside. Makes no sense right now – and the new security should keep the bean-counters off our backs for a while,’ KC revealed, without breaking eye-contact before she did.
OK, thought Eloise, great, but what backroom deals have been done?
‘OK, great!’ she said with as much confidence as she could muster. ‘Yes, it would be too much of an upheaval, really, wouldn’t it? But thanks for letting me know. I do appreciate it. And the latte.’
‘You’re welcome, Eloise. But that’s not all. I just got a seriously tempting offer to speak at a conference up in… Leicester? Did I pronounce that right? OK, good! And I really want you to come too. I want to shift the focus of the talk to archaic DNA. Keep that spotlight shining on Sarah.’
Eloise was flattered, excited. Confused, concerned. The more she talked in public about Sarah the more she stayed connected with the project, but this also would mean a night away in some melancholy hotel. With KC. She wasn’t sure that she should go but her lab partner was persuasive, said that his ‘money men’ were fully behind the idea. The funding gods must be appeased, after all.
So she went – and the inevitable moment arrived.
A moment after an enjoyable day, after a dinner of further discoveries as to their mutual tastes and influences, heroes and passions. After too many drinks. In the corridor – as they said goodnight.
KC leaned in, his height matching hers so the move required no clumsiness. He pecked her on the cheek a little too firmly and held her wrist a little too long. As she began to turn away he switched to kiss the other cheek and their mouths brushed, ever so lightly. Eloise nearly responded. So nearly. But godammit, she thought (as the image of his full-cheeked, wide-smiling wife loomed large), how could she betray every principle for this – whatever it may turn out to be?
As KC apologised, saying, ‘Oops, sorry… never sure with Europeans, how many times, which side and all.’ She smiled and turned away, fumbling for her keycard. Naturally, the lock would not go green when she swiped it and then swiped it again. She flushed. KC reached in and took the keycard from her and she let him hold her hand for a moment as he did so. With the first swipe, for him, the light switched to green. Even so, Eloise had heeded the warning of all those preceding red dots.
In an absurd falsetto, she tried to appear unruffled.
‘Thank you, KC. Good night! Sleep well,’ she said, and slipped inside her room.
‘Good night, Eloise,’ he agreed.
But then he waited, swaying slightly, eyelids heavy, until her door was fully closed.
*
The infant, her weapons, her tools, any surplus food that might last long enough to carry with them, it’s all too much now. There is no part of her body unburdened. And now she has learned the hard way that they must always carry a little firewood and some extra kindling in case the fungus has lost its smoulder, and her scooped-out circle of flint will have to go to work. They have seen too many days of empty ground.
At least the terrifying night-walk had brought food instead of death
, at least the only life they had met was a surprised groundhog that she could take with ease. Even better, by following the stars they had come to a place where a family of trees had once flourished. Now their blanched and broken branches reproach the sky as it waits for the coming dawn, but there is wood enough here. Dead as it is, it burns well and she can sleep at last, once the flames are raging.
She wakes again with hope, but knowing that she has a serious task ahead. The load she bears has become too much for the simple slings across her chest and back, for the small pouches around her waist, too much for her arms and shoulders and hands. She needs to make a basket. The kind she can strap to her back, the kind the women of home would carry when walking between camps, or when harvesting from the trees.
There was a place, in the autumn, a place her grandmother knew where the cane was plentiful. Strong and supple. The old woman had made certain of it: tended the sodden ground, taken out the smaller, weaker plants, cut away any rival growth and burned the roots back into the soil when the reeds were cut away during the dry season. Many had not understood what her grandmother did every year, or why, and some had laughed at her efforts, but the women who weaved understood.
How she wished now that she had heeded them. Stayed longer while they selected and cut, then wet and worked the cane, not grown bored and restless and run off to follow her brothers in more exciting pursuits. For she has struggled to find a faded sapling here with the right softness in its roots or any tree with twigs that bend instead of snap, or to know which type of stripped-away bark might work instead. She has tried and failed, again and again. She has strained to remember any pattern of weaving that held itself and did not unravel. Fought to control fingers that sting from slices and splinters, that ache from such delicate yet futile work. She has failed to hold back her cursing, despite how her anger disturbs the little one.
At last, after a precarious branch-snapping climb up one of the taller trees, she has found some kind of parasitic vine that has outlived its withered host and perhaps not long since given up the last of its leaves. She strips away the supple ropes and sets to work again. After several attempts she has wrought something that she hopes will work and she lines her new basket with the bear skin. It is ugly and she imagines it will fall apart quite soon. It sits crookedly on her back and cuts into shoulders that she must now wrap with a thicker layer of hide, but she has done it. Made something new. Made something necessary.
The little one, now able to sit without assistance and lift herself up to grip the rim of the basket, is thrilled with this new thing. She tries to copy her mother as she packs it with useful things, picking up handfuls of the pebbles all around her and putting them inside. She cries when her mother casts out this excess weight, then giggles as she picks them up and puts each one back again into the basket. Her mother cannot help but laugh a little too.
*
Facing another night alone in a wretched hotel room, Eloise was torn, remorseful, tempted. This was not some crazy and uncontrollable desire, even if she’d done little to discourage KC’s wine-fuelled flirtation over dinner. And yet she felt a touch regretful for not taking the bait. More, she was resentful of her own self-righteousness (and not for the first time in her life). Or was this nothing more than cowardice?
After she’d closed the door on KC she’d hesitated, held the handle for a moment, begun to open it again, so nearly walking out into the over-lit corridor to knock at his room, before finally releasing the handle and leaning back hard against the inside of her bedroom door. She had sacrificed so much in the service of doing the right thing… How could she do the wrong thing now? How could she render worthless all those other decisions to let something go, to deny herself? For what might well be a dire disappointment and an excruciating morning after. Or the ruthless self-ablation of realising that she’d fallen for the long game. Or deadliest of all (and, she suspected, the most likely outcome) a devastating entanglement.
She poured a nightcap from the minibar knowing she would suffer for it in the morning, but unsure whether the extra alcohol was intended for the courage to give in or the courage to resist. One sip, one thought about KC’s family and she knew that she would not open the door again that night. While she had no offspring of her own, Eloise could not bear the thought of children in any kind of anguish, and certainly did not want to be the cause of it. Various rounds of volunteering with the Samaritans had taught her not only how to listen but also about how much emotional damage can be inflicted in youth and the insidious havoc it might wreak over a lifetime.
Eloise had debated nature over nurture, endlessly. She understood how much in terms of physiology was dictated by those tiny spirals. The true markers of anything resembling ‘destiny’. And yet, not intractably deterministic, not hopelessly enslaving. Lifestyle choices, or trauma, or the right therapy could re-write the agenda and flick so many of the switches on or off, altering the behaviour of a gene without altering its code. Could acquired damage (biological or emotional) soon be corrected? Would the inherited indicators of future pain finally be overcome? Yes, she wholeheartedly believed so, the mind-blowing possibilities were already unfolding before them. As far as disease and disability were concerned this was her passion, her mission. But what about the genetic effects on behaviour or character?
Her best friend, Anna (another who had fallen foul of the mating lottery), had adopted from Asia after long, expensive and dispiriting failures of IVF, and Eloise was a conscientious if secular godmother to the child. She often wondered why there were so many reproductive cul-de-sacs in her own pioneering but sacrificial generation. They had shattered ceilings for sure but not without splitting heads and splintering hearts. May-Lynn, Anna’s feisty little daughter, had settled well and clung to her new life with insatiable curiosity and affection – but Eloise had made it a long-term if discreet project to watch and see how the girl ‘within’ emerged and how she responded to, or was affected by, her transposed world ‘without’.
She might have made a good mother herself, Eloise felt that now. It had taken an ailing and incontinent pet to teach her, if slowly and painfully, how much practical patience and forgiveness she had to offer. Admittedly she may not have been a laugh a minute, and yes, she would have been a dedicated (though gentle) disciplinarian, but she hoped that she would have been wise and warm.
No. No regrets, no room for that. Eloise knew that she’d done the best she could based on who she was, and what she’d known, and the cards she’d had to play at any time. When she got together with the few friends with children that still made time for her, yes, she might feel sharp pangs over a giggle or a cuddle but also absolute relief in being able to walk away from tears or a tantrum. They all seemed so exhausted. Not to mention obsessed. Although, considering the labour overload on the modern woman combined with the media’s manipulative hysteria and a mystical cult of motherhood online, this was hardly a surprise.
She could not remember her own sensible and studious mother, a renowned anthropologist and photographer, ever fussing or fretting so. Even as adventurous and accident-prone as her young daughter had been.
In her more sanctimonious moments, Eloise was tempted to think that her childlessness was a kind of social and ecological sacrifice, considering the twin bogeymen of exponential overpopulation and mismanaged resources.
Oh bugger it, she thought. She was tired of turning it over and over, tired of worrying for herself and the world. She wished she could live instead like some impulsive hedonist, without a care, without a shred of guilt or remorse. She finished the miniature vodka, decided against another and contemplated the attractions of her vacant hotel bed.
They failed to convince. Eloise recognised that she was too much in her head, as usual, and there would be no sleep for a while. The only answer was to get back into her body, to move about, to change the record. Yes, that was it. Records! The fail-safe cure. If she’d been at home she would have made a cup of chamomile tea and put on some music. Here, the onl
y option that would not disturb her fellow guests (particularly KC next door) was her museum-piece Sony Walkman, packed on a whim when she’d suspected the hotel’s televisual offering would be of little comfort, if comfort were required. Eloise loved that the old device was still (just about) working after all these years. Still cradling that cherished compilation of Northern Soul, a love token from the only college boyfriend to have earned the gift of her heart.
Eloise pressed down the play button with a satisfying click and felt her body begin to move. Soon she had pushed the pointless hotel chairs out of her way and was twirling around a strip of cheap carpet as if she were 19 again, up at some riotous weekender in Wigan. There was insufficient space to break out all of her moves but it didn’t matter, she was working up a sweat and writhing away the frustration. As ‘Tainted Love’ segued into ‘Needle in a Haystack’ her mood had shifted and that painful old needle was no longer sticking on its favourite emotional scratch.
Ah hell, she conceded, parenthood had never really been on the agenda, even if she had found, in time, an engineered cure for her own inherited Damoclean sword. That damnable Kluft curse that lay coiled within her cells. (Or if any one of her relationships had worked out.) Ultimately, she was and always had been a free spirit. Maybe not so spirited anymore but still free. The horizons of opportunity may have hazed over with time but she still had the freedom of choice, and the sanctuary of solitude whenever she chose it.
And yet… perhaps when it was all a little too late, Eloise had begun to feel that she might make a good life partner now, after all – albeit any partnership faring better if part-time and non-cohabiting. She had no illusions. No expectations beyond kindness. She did not need anyone to complete or appreciate or flatter her. No need for social status or financial support. She was certainly much less intense about affairs of the heart (or body) than she had been in her youth. Crucially, she no longer needed to be right, nor did she have any strict criteria for what would be right in a partner. She was diligent these days about avoiding all the ‘shoulds’ or ‘should haves’ (for herself or anyone else). Learning to spurn the bitter seductions of blame.
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